Thank you guys for all these replies! It's very motivating! I'm
currently rethinking my proposal thanks to your advices.
Jacek,
> can you start evolving your proposal on wiki.eclipse.org?
Sure [1].
> Are there any brief concepts of ext.points btw?
Unfortunately I don't know the details yet - everything is in early
phase. I plan to do what will be needed to use extension points when
they are released, and as fallback, if it won't be possible I'll make
hacks just to get things done. This will be great proof of potential
lacks in Orion's design (if any). I plan to continuously discuss with
orion-dev during the summer in order to integrate particular features
in proper way, if the rules won't be defined earlier.
I'll answer your questions about Orion when I'll receive reply from
Orion folks. They seem to be very busy right now. I didn't receive any
comments about my proposal draft yet.
> [...] I imagine we could focus on making one rock-solid feature and a bunch of proof of concept ones, that could be improved later.
I like this approach! Maybe code autocompletion as the main feature?
Some other features like outliner should be easier to do when the
basics for the former one will be there.
> How would you like to implement PHP syntax highlighting, or code formatting, or AST tree?
I think incorporating ANTLR for AST tree and source code parsing in
general would be good. For syntax highlighting, I can use Ace, or
implement simple highlighting by hand in a way it's done in Orion
codebase for JavaScript. For code formatting, I'm not sure now. I
thought I could reuse PDT but now I think it'd be very problematic.
Also I didn't find satisfying information about creating parsing tree
in ANTLR and generating source code from it, so I don't know if it's
possible. I need to abandon some features anyway to make less but make
them better, as you noticed.
More info on wiki!
> I'd highly recommend "JavaScript: The good parts" book to get in speed with this fancy language.
Thank you! Already reading it. This book is great, short and to the point.
[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/User:Karol.gusak.eu/GSoC_Proposal_Orion_Web_IDE_PHP_Editor
Regards,
Karol